The state's Regional Service Centers will no longer issue lesson plans for an online curriculum system that has been criticized for being anti-American, legislators announced in a news conference Monday.

"The era of CSCOPE lesson plans has come to an end," announced Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, who chairs the senate Education Committee and co-authored a bill to provide oversight to CSCOPE. Senate Bill 1406, lawmakers said, passed the Senate but will be pulled down from the Texas House's agenda. "At the end of the day, I think this is the best move forward for our regional service centers, for our parents, for our students and for our teachers."

The agreement by the CSCOPE board to eliminate the lesson plan component of the program was brokered in 72 hours, Patrick said, and on Friday, the 20 governing board members are expected to unanimously vote to end lesson plans. The plans are in use at 877 Texas districts, or 78 percent of all school districts in Texas, said Kyle Wargo, the executive director of Regional Service Center 17 in Lubbock and a CSCOPE board member.

According to Express-News reports, smaller districts in Bexar County, such as Lackland ISD and Somerset ISD, use it. The area's larger ones — Northside, North East, San Antonio and Harlandale — design their own. School superintendents who testified in a recent Senate Education Committee hearing said the system is widely used because it is flexible and affordable.

Patrick and other lawmakers, though, said they got complaints from parents about the curriculum, including a lesson on the Boston Tea Party that invites students to include the perspective of Britons who might have considered it an "act of terrorism," and other allegations that CSCOPE promotes Islam over Christianity.

Texas Freedom Network attributed the end of the lesson plans to a "successful witch hunt," saying that Monday's announcement followed months of political pressure from Sen. Patrick and "Tea party and other activist groups who attacked the online tool for allegedly promoting anti-American, Marxist and pro-Islamic lessons."

"Today political bullying resulted in hundreds of school districts getting thrown under the bus and essentially told to figure out for themselves where to find the resources to replace the service CSCOPE had provided them. The big lesson here is that if you can generate a witch hunt that includes enough incendiary and distorted claims, then there are politicians at the Capitol who are ready to throw their supposed commitment to local control out the window," a statement by TFN president Kathy Miller read.

Asked how he responded to the allegations of a witch hunt, Patrick said, "I don't respond to absurd charges."

Wargo said that on Friday, letters will be sent to districts that have CSCOPE contracts to let them know that the lesson plan aspect of the program will end in 90 days. Other aspects of CSCOPE will remain intact, Wargo said.

"We've learned one thing: lesson plans have a lot of subjectivity to them. We talk about how vast Texas is – one size does not fit all in this great state," Wargo said. "Lessons need to be developed at a local level, by the teacher, who understands the values and needs in that community."

Patrick said that he believes legislators should have some oversight over online curriculum, but that lawmakers' exact roles have not yet been determined. While the Texas State Board of Education should take the lead on educating the state's students, local districts should be closely behind, he said, and lawmakers should provide oversight.

"Any company that's going to come to Texas and try to sell their program to the classrooms of the 8500 campuses in Texas, we're going to take a very close look at," he said.